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TDWG Ontology
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Document rewrite rule needs for rs.tdwg.org #1

Open mdoering opened 9 years ago

mdoering commented 9 years ago

Ontology part of tdwg/infrastructure#59

baskaufs commented 9 years ago

Relevant URIs are http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/ (the one that forms the base of the URIs that will get dereferenced) and http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/ (I don't know the purpose of this one - it contains the same files as the first).

mdoering commented 9 years ago

is anyone aware of why there is http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/ ? Should we maybe leave that unresolved until we hear from someone that needs it?

baskaufs commented 9 years ago

In the run-up to completing the VoMaG Report, we tried to figure out the origin/purpose of the various versions of the TDWG Ontology documents so that we could direct people to a single version that was authoritative. At that time, no one involved in the process of writing the report could figure out the purpose of the documents at the http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/ url. As far as we could tell, they were exactly the same as the ones at http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/. In the end, our recommendation was:

Recommendation 2.2. Since the documents located at http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/ appear to have no use and are apparently not linked to any TDWG web pages, they should be deleted. If it is felt that the URIs of these documents might be in use, use HTTP 301 redirects to the authoritative versions at http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/.

After having more time to think about this, I am pretty sure that just "deleting" them is not a good idea, since we have no idea what might be "broken" if that were done. It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to do a 301 "moved permanently" redirect to corresponding documents in the tag/release at https://github.com/tdwg/ontology/tree/v2009-12-18. That would accomplish two things:

  1. a machine attempting to retrieve a copy of a document as it was in the http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/ directory would get exactly the document that it wanted (i.e. one that is exactly the same as what was present in the http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/). No applications would be "broken".
  2. a human putting a URL like http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/voc/Collection.rdf into a web browser would be redirected to a URL like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tdwg/ontology/v2009-12-18/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf . That would alert the person to the fact that http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology2/voc/Collection.rdf is not a current URI and with some minimal investigation the person could discover the page https://github.com/tdwg/ontology that would inform him/her about the current status of the ontologies.

I just suspect that leaving this unresolved until we hear from someone who needs it would result in waiting forever. The recommendations of the VoMaG report were intended to eliminate the situation where a person stumbles upon an obsolete version of the TDWG Ontology and was unable to learn that an ontology was no longer under development and was effectively deprecated. I think the 301 redirect method might accomplish that.

mdoering commented 8 years ago

http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology is now proxying to the github pages site of the ontology repo. I have added the human.css and images from the owl machine to the gh-pages branch so it should be the same: https://github.com/tdwg/ontology/commit/0a12070c74511d33b3a5207e38a55ba9e0b2dafb

Note that http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology now exposes the latest versions from the master branch as the gh-pages branch was just created from master. @baskaufs, if we need to expose an older version please update the gh-pages branch or let me know which version from the master we should be exposing. Ideally this should be tagged!

baskaufs commented 8 years ago

I just tried dereferencing one of the ontology URIs: http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonRank and got a 404 Not Found. Not sure why. I think that the URIs should dereference to the latest version because those were the ones where I went through and implemented the recommendations of the VoMaG group by noting that they were no longer under development, etc. If you want to tag that version, I suppose that's fine, but I don't anticipate that anybody is going to make further modifications to them since they aren't under development and as far as I know, won't be in the future.